Skyline fence is a site specific fence designed for the Jerusalem Gateway Project. The Jerusalem Gateway Project is destined to become one of Israel’s most important business quarters and establish Israel’s largest integrated transportation hub.
As the construction work of the area will span throughout the course of more than a decade, in an area which is a hustling transportation hub and the entrance to Jerusalem the capital of Israel, the project’s management team created a multidisciplinary team of municipality officials, urban planners, landscape architects, graphic designers and industrial designers, with the purpose of the team to design the construction areas of the project in a way that would keep them fully functional, create a sense of place-making and communicate the project throughout the construction work.
Our studio was in charge of the industrial design elements of the project. One of the tasks we were given was to design a temporary fence that could be easily assembled, disassemble and moved around according to the projects rapidly changing needs.
The concept of the Skyline fence was to use the fence’s segments as a storytelling vehicle to tell the story of the Jerusalem Gateway Project and hint at the city’s future architectural skyline, to the tens of thousands of pedestrians using this expansive area in their day to day life and commutes. We wanted to use the border between the pedestrians and the construction site to tell a positive story of a promising future.
Function wise the main challenge of the project was to design a fence that would be visually enticing and fit to tell the project’s story, while being organic and right to the object’s function as a fence in highly demanding areas of construction sites and urban environments. For this reason, and in order to keep the fence functional for construction workers and pedestrians we wanted to use standard manufacturing techniques and materials of modular fences and keep the fence light weight, durable and compact, in order to make them easy to use, move and assemble. In addition, the use of the archetypical modular fence language also makes the surprise and delight of the identification of the architectural outlines within the fences fun and joyful.